Heroes & Villains’ E.A. Henson Has Thoughts On Robert Pattinson As Batman

Robert Pattinson IS Batman…maybe. Nicholas Hoult could also be Batman too.

When the news came down at 9 p.m. Thursday night I immediately made it my duty to disseminate it among my inner circle of friends as quickly as I possibly could so that I could gauge their reactions.

My findings were largely positive: One was ecstatic about the casting, three were positive, one was meh, and one outright negative. Bumping this up against the Ben Affleck casting news data I collected from five years ago (which was almost unilaterally negative), the casting of Pattinson already seems like a solid choice.

“BUT WAIT,” says the 1966 Batman tv show announcer, “A NEW COOL CANDIDATE FOR THE COVETED ROLE OF THE CAPED CRUSADER APPEARS!”

Within 20 minutes of the Pattinson announcement sources were already saying that Nicholas Hoult was in the running for Batman as well. Much like animals can sense the coming of earthquakes and other natural disasters, I too can sense the coming of impotent nerd rage on the internet. A tide of digital bile, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the last Game of Thrones episode aired days ago was coming and it threatened to remove all the actual news from public consciousness.

The internet is a largely terrible place. The fact that I’m using it to write a hot take on the Batman casting isn’t entirely lost on me right now, but also measles is having a banner year because of it. My point is that the internet will always remember the worst possible thing about any scenario and the potential casting of an actor that was in a series of bad movies a while back is the only thing the internet seems concerned with right now (admit it, you don’t know if I’m writing about the Twilight series or the recent crop of X-Men movies right now, do you?).

Pattison is a tremendous actor that went and made some interesting choices after the Twilight franchise ended. Will he be able to put on a mask with pointy ears and make me suspend my disbelief for a couple hours on a summer afternoon in the not too distant future? Most definitely.

There was an undercurrent out there on the internet last night that took me back a few decades to when Keaton was announced for Batman ’89. The reaction around local comic shops (a beta microcosm of what the internet was to become) was “MR. MOM AS BATMAN?!? NO WAY!” I think we all remember how that turned out.

I don’t doubt there’s already a change.org petition to ‘FORCE WB TO REMOVE TWILIGHT GUY AND CAST PROPER ALPHA MALE AS BATMAN” and I’m exhausted that I have to think these thoughts. If Pattinson is indeed going to be the new Batman, I’m completely on board with the casting and I think there’s a chance that he and Matt Reeves could do something really interesting with the movie they want to make.